The most important election ever

Most every campaign cycle, it seems, presidential candidates and political pundits claim this election is the most important one ever. It’s become something of a cliché in American politics. This time, however, they just might be correct. Rarely before in modern times has the divide between the two parties been as stark.

That division largely revolves around the debate that has roiled American politics for much of the past century: What is the role of government in the lives of the American people. Republicans have generally sought to minimize the federal government’s role and responsibilities, particularly on economic issues, while Democrats tried to expand it. But the two parties have generally coalesced around broad areas of consensus on the basic elements of the modern welfare state.

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No longer can that be said to be true. The Republican Party’s invocation of President Barack Obama’s supposed “radical agenda,” notwithstanding, little of this divide is the result of Democrats moving further to the left. Indeed, most of the proposals offered in Obama’s State of the Union speech, like greater investments in education, clean energy and manufacturing, reflect what the federal government is already doing today.

A good chunk of Obama’s proposals involve using the Tax Code to provide credits or public-private partnerships rather than grandiose new spending initiatives. This is the sort of middle-of-the-road, even tepid liberalism practiced by Democrats for decades.

But if Republicans were to win the White House, hold the House and take back the Senate (a reasonable possibility if Obama is defeated for reelection), the country would experience a very different sort of change.

Conservatives have long sought to shrink the welfare state. But never before have they outlined proposals to shrink it so significantly. More important, rarely before has there been such broad consensus within the GOP to do so.

To understand how a Republican-dominated Washington might transform the country, consider the budget passed by the House last spring — the so-called Ryan budget. Every congressional Republican supported it and Mitt Romney has endorsed it. But what would it mean in policy terms?

First are the tax implications. The Ryan plan would reduce the top marginal tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. It would also end income tax on capital gains, dividends and interest and get rid of corporate and estate taxes. These moves would go beyond the two separate tax cuts passed under President George W. Bush in 2001 and 2003, and are in line with Romney’s current tax proposals. These cuts would not only increase the deficit, they would make it nearly impossible to maintain the federal government’s current spending responsibilities.

Indeed, it is on the spending side where the American people would feel the greatest impact. Passage of a budget like this would lead to the end of Medicare, in its current form, for those under age 55; the block granting of Medicaid to the states; an end to the Children’s Health Insurance Program; and privatization of key elements of Social Security.

What about Obama’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act? It is hard to find a prominent Republican who hasn’t called for its repeal. While it would be difficult for the GOP to erase the program, key elements could be gutted so as to make it largely unworkable.

Much of this could be done through the reconciliation process — meaning Senate Republicans might need only a bare majority along with a presidential signature to upend almost 50 years of social policy geared toward providing guaranteed health care access for potentially tens, if not hundreds of millions of Americans.

What about other areas of domestic spending? Romney has a plan to cap discretionary spending at 20 percent. When one subtracts the 4 percent he has pledged for the military (higher than current levels of defense spending), that would leave only 16 percent of the budget for everything that doesn’t include entitlements and the military.

Such a cap would lead to more than $600 billion in reductions of nonmilitary spending in 2016 alone, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and could mean a drop of $6.5 trillion in spending from 2014 to 2022.

This would lead to massive spending cuts in everything from education, transportation and public television to food stamps, unemployment insurance and the National Institute of Health. The social safety net would be shredded. No part of the federal government — except possibly the military — would look as it does today.

Indeed, these cuts could be even larger when you factor in the automatic reductions included in last summer’s debt-limit deal. This federal budgetary belt-tightening would then trickle down to the states — which would confront even greater fiscal pressure to provide citizens with the services no longer fully funded by the federal government.

Quite simply, if such legislation were enacted, the government, as we know it, would exist in a far more truncated form. And would be largely unrecognizable.

How about the regulatory state? Congressional Republicans have introduced legislation to repeal the Dodd-Frank financial reform legislation, and every major Republican presidential candidate has endorsed this. In addition, the House has passed the Regulations From the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act, legislation that would require Congress to approve any federal regulation costing more than $100 million a year. It’s an initiative supported, in spirit, by each of the major GOP candidates.

Such a bill would dramatically curtail Washington’s regulatory powers on everything from food safety to investor protections, labor law and health care. Environmental regulation and the Environmental Protection Agency, which has been in the cross hairs of the GOP Congress and GOP candidates, would most likely take a significant hit. Any progress on tackling climate change, already unlikely, would be stopped dead in its tracks.

The effects could also be felt elsewhere. It’s not hard to imagine that the GOP’s tough talk on illegal immigration will be accompanied by a further focus on enforcement and deportation. Efforts to strip away collective-bargaining rights for public-sector employees on the state level could be replicated on a federal stage.

If the campaign promises of the likely GOP nominee and the current leadership of Congress are to be believed, all this stands a reasonable chance of being pursued legislatively — and enacted if Republicans sweep the 2012 election. While you could argue that the GOP would be unlikely to do this out of fear for the political ramifications — Republican leaders have hardly shied away from this. What reason is there to doubt that they would do precisely as they say?

If they did, it would be the realization of the long-held conservative vision for the federal government — a dramatically shrunk public sector, declining streams of federal revenue, an end to federal guarantees of health care as well as, potentially, Social Security, with significant chunks of federal responsibility shipped to the states.

More than just a rollback of the New Deal, it has the potential to be a rollback of the entire progressive era.

Partisans on both sides can argue about whether such change would represent a good or bad thing. That is likely to be a key disagreement on the campaign trail. But this is the choice that Americans will face this fall — between likely more of the same from Obama, and a very different world if Republicans are victorious.

What all this means is that 2012 is shaping up to be anything but a boring election — indeed one of the most potentially momentous in American history.

Michael Cohen, a fellow at the Century Foundation, is author of “Live From the Campaign Trail: The Greatest Presidential Campaign Speeches of the 20th Century and How They Shaped Modern America.” Follow him on twitter at speechboy71.